Project 2025 – The Department of State
By The Project 2025 chapter* on the State Department is a plan to transform the State Department into the President’s political arm in international affairs. Institutional knowledge would be jettisoned, most personnel would be replaced, and those remaining would be subject to political indoctrination and firing for not toeing the President’s line.
If you thought Donald Trump got a bum rap in being impeached for trying to shake down Volodymyr Zelinsky or if you’re loving his photo-ops with Viktor Orbán, you’ll love Project 2025.
Additionally, Project 2025 would end treaties or any treaty-like agreement with other countries. This has long been an ambition of the Republican Party. All such agreements would be defunded and considered for funding only if they advanced the party line or could be bent or broken in that direction.
Immigration and building enmity with China, along with regime change in Iran, are high on the priority list. According to the report, Mexico has become a third-world country and should be treated as such, although the report holds back from recommending declaring war.
Some of these objectives are not put quite as baldly as I have expressed them here, but some have, and others clearly lead to these conclusions. It’s going to take more than one post to go through some of the specifics. This is a radical document that proposes to change the place of the United States in the world.
A continuing whine from the Trumpies is that the oppositional bureaucracy never let Trump be Trump. That bureaucracy did unforgiveable things like remind Trump of the rule of law. The State Department, according to Project 2025, was among the worst. Some selections from the early sections of the chapter:
There are scores of fine diplomats who serve the President’s agenda, often helping to shape and interpret that agenda. At the same time, however, in all Administrations, there is a tug-of-war between Presidents and bureaucracies— and that resistance is much starker under conservative Presidents, due largely to the fact that large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision.
It should not and cannot be this way: The American people need and deserve a diplomatic machine fully focused on the national interest as defined through the election of a President who sets the domestic and international agenda for the nation. The next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the President and, thereby, the American people.
A major source, if not the major source, of the State Department’s ineffectiveness lies in its institutional belief that it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.
The next President can make the State Department more effective by providing a clear foreign policy vision, selecting political officials and career diplomats that will enthusiastically turn that vision into a policy agenda, and firmly supporting the State Department as it makes the necessary institutional adjustments.
Focusing the State Department on the needs and goals of the next President will require the President’s handpicked political leadership—as well as foreign service and civil service personnel who share the President’s vision and policy agendas—to run the department. This can be done by taking these steps at the outset of the next Administration.
… the next President can exert leverage on the Senate if he or she is willing to place State Department appointees directly into those roles, pending confirmation.
Assert Leadership in the Appointment Process. The next Administration should assert leadership over, and guidance to, the State Department by placing political appointees in positions that do not require Senate confirmation, including senior advisors, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and Deputy Assistant Secretaries. Given the department’s size, the next Administration should also increase the number of political appointees to manage it.
… No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.
Support and Train Political Appointees. The Secretary of State should use his or her office and its resources to ensure regular coordination among all political appointees, which should take the form of strategy meetings, trainings, and other events. The secretary should also take reasonable steps to ensure that the State Department’s political appointees are connected to other departments’ political appointees, which is critical for cross-agency effectiveness and morale.
Maximize the Value of Career Officials. The secretary must find a way to make clear to career officials that despite prior history and modes of operation, they need not be adversaries of a conservative President, Secretary of State, or the team of political appointees.
Reboot Ambassadors Worldwide. All ambassadors are required to submit letters of resignation at the start of a new Administration… The next Administration … should both accept the resignations of all political ambassadors and quickly review and reassess all career ambassadors. This review should commence well before the new Administration’s first day.
The priority should be to put in place new ambassadors who support the President’s agenda among political appointees, foreign service officers, and civil service personnel, with no predetermined percentage among these categories. Political ambassadors with strong personal relationships with the President should be prioritized for key strategic posts such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
More to come: The next section is “Righting the Ship.”
* The chapter starts on numbered page 171, pdf page 204.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner